Leigh Carmichael talks sex, death and a decade of Dark Mofo
For the final act of Leigh Carmichael’s Dark Mofo festival swan song, he strips down with Review’s Tim Douglas for the nude solstice swim to discuss art, controversy and a singular legacy.
The emperor has no clothes.
Well, he’s not completely naked. He does have on a small, red rubber cap. And a smile. Yes, the emperor wears a smile, almost as wide as the Derwent River that stretches out from beneath his bare feet across Hobart. But apart from that smile, and his little red cap, the emperor has no clothes.
And nor, it should be said, does Review.
The emperor – let’s call him Leigh Carmichael, outgoing creative director at Dark Mofo, Tasmania’s midwinter arts festival – is surveying the final act of his final act: the 10th solstice nude swim at Hobart’s Sandy Bay. Some 2000 fellow travellers have stripped down and braved the 2C weather from 7am to mark the shortest day of the year, when the earth’s poles arrive at their farthest tilt from the sun.
The winter solstice swim – officially the final event on the Dark Mofo calendar – has its roots in the Pagan tradition of Yule and the embracing of nature. But the swim itself has, perhaps perversely, another connotation. A Christian one. As Carmichael prepares for this come-to-the-river moment and reflects on 10 years of arts programming at Dark Mofo – most of it radical; much of it controversial – might he have any sins for which to atone?
The 47-year-old’s smile widens. “Sins?” he says, breaking into a laugh. “Oh, I have plenty.”
Absolution, if he wants it, is moments away. Buddhist monks start beating drums on the esplanade, and a minute later a red flare ignites at the southern end of the beach. A gong sounds as the clock ticks over to 7:42am – solstice time – and the crowd applauds and screams. That’s our cue. A tsunami of flesh rushes towards the water’s edge, and before there is time to register the shock of the cold, we’re wading into the frigid 10C Derwent at sunrise.
The emperor – more penguin than man – is in his element.
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Carmichael is no stranger to the analogy of the emperor’s new clothes, the Hans Christian Andersen tale about a leader exposed, figuratively and literally, in front of his subjects. In the 10 years since the former beer can designer was anointed by David Walsh as the inaugural director of the Museum of Old and New Art’s edgy midwinter arts festival, Carmichael has variously been lauded and maligned. Visionary or villain? Culturally insensitive charlatan or once-in-a-generation agent of artistic change?
So, naked truth: which is it, Leigh Carmichael? “That’s for other people to decide,” he says. “I am proud of everything we have done. It’s been a wild ride. We had no idea when we started this festival that it would become what it is today.”
Perhaps the key to Carmichael’s legacy can be found in the numbers. In 2013, 100,000 punters attended the inaugural festival. It seems quaint to recall that event was headlined by rockers You Am I, Canadian singer Martha Wainwright and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra playing Fantasia. Perhaps at a surface level, the first real sign of something edgier was Japanese sound artist Ryoji Ikeda’s Spectra – a sine wave installation that beamed white light 15km into the sky. It was a signal that Dark Mofo was determined to do things differently.
By the time the 2023 festival concluded on Thursday, almost 430,000 people had been registered engaging with art beneath the event’s ubiquitous red flags. That is a 60 per cent increase on numbers from 2022. In real terms, though, Carmichael’s final year numbers are a phenomenal 358 per cent increase on his first event.
In 2013, 30 per cent of tickets sold came from interstate. That figure now, remarkably, is 70 per cent, according to festival organisers. Dark Mofo’s headliners this year included megastar English composer Max Richter and American musician Thundercat, as well as well-known Danish electro musician Trentemoller and Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger. The festival’s Night Mass – wherein an entire precinct in the city is repurposed as music and entertainment venues – sold out within days of going on sale. There were events over at MONA, and across the city and at the family friendly Dark Park at Macquarie Point, where 20,000 people visited. A record 2000 people had signed up to do the nude solstice swim, a far cry from the few hundred in 2013 who braved the icy waters and threats of arrest by police for indecent exposure. And there, this year, shining above the throng, was Ikeda’s Spectra, its light undimmed 10 years after its first outing.
Dark Mofo has gone from fledgling festival outlier to a staple of the Australian arts scene and the Tasmanian tourism calendar, contributing an estimated $35 million annually to the Apple Isle’s economy. Carmichael’s tenure is one of the longest for a major state festival director in Australia, and the germ of an idea he pitched to Museum of Old and New Art founder David Walsh is now a globally recognised brand.
“I asked David Walsh for approval to support my proposal for a winter festival,” says Carmichael. “David said, ‘Whatever this event becomes, it needs to be art-led, we _already have a music festival (in summer festival MONA FOMA)’ and he suggested we focus on large scale public art.”
It needed to ask big questions, and it certainly met the brief. Indeed it continues to challenge, disrupt and upset. On Sunday evening, at the Pagan-inspired Ogoh-Ogoh procession from Constitution Dock to Macquarie Park and the ritual burning of an oversized totem (this year it was a platypus), Christian evangelicals offered to “save” families on their way to the spectacle.
“It’s not too late,” they called. “Jesus loves you”.
In the festival’s 10 years, its sure but incremental push for radical programming has managed to ignite the opprobrium of just about every corner of the community. There were the religious groups (recall the inverted illuminated, oversized crosses placed around the city in 2018); traffic and human rights groups (performance artist Mike Parr’s subterranean three-day stay buried beneath the city’s main street); and the animal and religious activists who for weeks protested against 150.Action, Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch’s six-hour long Dionysian industrial opera. The work, which featured a live orchestra, 500 litres of blood and a slain bull’s carcass against which disciples were “crucified”, saw death threats directed to Carmichael.
And all this, of course, was before Dark Mofo’s Icarus moment, when it enraged the local Indigenous community with the announcement in 2020 of Spanish artist Santiago Sierra’s proposed Union Flag. Indigenous artists being asked to donate their blood, in which the symbol of colonialism was to be doused, was seen as a bridge too far. Aboriginal groups argued they had shed enough blood. Carmichael tried to defend the work, but three days after it was announced, Union Flag was cancelled. The festival very nearly suffered the same fate.
That Carmichael – and the festival itself – survived that period is something of a miracle. Mofo heeded the calls for increased involvement of Indigenous artists and curators, as well as deeper consultation on works involving Aboriginal issues, and emerged deeply bruised but ultimately unscathed. “We made it,” says Carmichael, who concedes the controversy took a toll personally. “It was important for me and for the festival to go through it. It was a painful time. But we learned a lot. You learn a lot about yourself at a time like that.” He pauses. “The biggest challenges are the ones that offer the greatest opportunity for personal growth.”
Tellingly, while Carmichael concedes the festival did the right thing, he has always defended the right to program Union Flag, and other difficult and confronting artworks, free of censorship.
He told Review last year: “I have been left wondering about the festival and about art, and about where the place is in Australia that might program confronting works in the future. I have been left wondering … if not us, then who?”
This year, for his swan song, he answered his own question, with the staging of arguably one of the festival’s most confronting works: Holzinger’s A Divine Comedy.
Featuring nudity, live masturbation, on-stage synchronised bowel movements, sex, taxidermy and female ejaculation, the dance-theatre piece was held at the 5000-capacity Derwent Entertainment Centre over three performances at the weekend. As Review’s colleague Andrew McMillen noted, that one show could be seen to encapsulate the arc of Carmichael’s tenure and Dark Mofo itself. Bold, uncompromising, real, painful, raw, confronting but ultimately beautiful.
Carmichael smiles at the notion. “It is a bit like that, isn’t it? Florentina is such an important artist, and we were very excited to bring her to Tasmania this year. It’s a real privilege to (have an artist of her caliber here). I suppose we see some of her work as radical, but in Europe this sort of work is not viewed as transgressive as it is here”.
Dark Mofo has always excelled at the art of subversion. Progressive programming and guerrilla marketing have been a big part of its modus operandi since inception. There were the mock kidnappings of punters from dancefloors, the risque social balls, and performances featuring, but not in any way limited to, nudity, blood, urine, faeces, sex and death. It’s manna from Hobart for journalists, influencers and punters (“Did I tell you about that one time at Dark Mofo that (insert random act of madness here) …”). But there has always been a method to the madness.
Arguably Carmichael’s most subversive act has been this: behind all the controversy and the marketing and the fawning/fulminating press and the protests and the outrage and death threats and the cancellations and the near-cancellations, he and his team have consistently programmed world-class art. See Marina Abramovic, Laurie Anderson, Pussy Riot, Doug Aitken, Mike Parr, The Kid Laroi, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, Blixa Bargeld, Einstürzende Neubauten, Nils Frahm, Holzinger.
“Having major international artists at the forefront of Dark Mofo has been incredibly important,” he says. But much of the festival’s success, he says, owes to Australian performance artist Mike Parr who during three festivals – variously burying himself or kneeling silently in a disused asylum for days – found a natural home for his practice.
“I am very proud of the work we did with Mike. He’s just an incredible artist and human being,” says Carmichael, who says he’s particularly pleased, too, about getting Nitsch’s 150.Action over the line.
“This is an artist with a 50-year career and who has three museums named after him. “Nitsch dealt in his work with the realities of life, in all its horror and beauty.” The Austrian died last year, aged 83.
Carmichael is learning to embrace change. This month he will leave the Australia Council board on which he has sat for after eight years as the peak funding body prepares to change to Creative Australia. And while he is stepping down as creative director at Dark Mofo, Carmichael won’t be going gently into the good night. He will continue working at Dark Lab, the festival’s organisational arm, as incoming boss Chris Twite takes over from 2024.
“I felt the festival was in a really good place this year,” Carmichael says. “It needs a new energy, and Chris will bring that. I am going to commit to giving Chris the space he needs to take it forward in the way he chooses. Every director needs a chance to make their mark, and make their own mistakes.”
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Carmichael, his little red cap beaming with the words “I see two moons”, is now up to his waist in water. The sun is peeking through the clouds over the city in which he was born, where he has raised his own family, and where he now is a household name. It’s clear what Carmichael has achieved in Hobart during the past decade has surpassed even his own expectations.
If anything, the emperor has been overdressed since the beginning.
Before his final absolution is complete and he disappears into the mass of red-capped, goose-pimpled flesh around us, I want the answer to one final question. In a word, describe the past 10 years?
He offers two. Uncertainty and heavy.
Carmichael turns, and hits the water. As unburdened and self-assured as he’s ever been, Australia’s most dynamic arts programmer dives into the Derwent, head submerged in search of revelation, bare arse saluting the sky.
Tim Douglas travelled to Tasmania with the assistance of Dark Mofo
